... [M]ight it be fair also to say that the champions of 'no difference' in race or sex, or intelligence ... are the guardians of a greater 'untruth' that allows people to live together in mutual harmony, implying that these critics really deserve to be praised as our protectors even when they are factually wrong? ... it is roughly how the self-appointed guardians choose to present themselves - leaving aside, usually, the step of frankly admitting that they are promoting factual untruths when they know that they are.

The public intellectual forum is being manipulated with intimidation and coercion and you are being lied to. The media is not doing its job, and the scientific community is not playing its proper public role as a beacon of dispassionate truth seeking, as a conduit of knowledge to the public, or in fostering an open and fair intellectual climate. Both are abusing their power and authority to do the opposite of their honor bound social and intellectual roles; facts are being distorted in service of values.

This post is a very long and detailed examination of what James Watson said, what the data reveal about James Watson's claims (i.e. are they, or are they not factually accurate), and what the media and scientists told the public about what the data reveal about James Watson's claims.

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It's difficult to name many more important living figures in 20th century biology than James Watson. He ushered in the current age of molecular biology with his achievements in 1953, he built up one of the world's greatest biological research facilities from damn near scratch, and he is a former head of the Human Genome Project.

Given such an august curriculum vitae, you would think that this man perhaps understands just a few things about genetics. But given only the condescending media coverage, you'd think this eminent geneticist was somehow "out of his depth" on this one.

... [Watson] is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address.

... there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Although Watson's book had already been out for a month with these more euphemistic, but still obvious, comments on race and intelligence, no one expressed any outrage. In fact the reviews were reverential and universally positive.

The explicit reference to intelligence and people of African heritage in his interview was clearly a violation of a much more formidable taboo. Still I am not aware of there being much noise about it until Oct. 17th when the Independent caused an immediate stir by calling attention to the remarks: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners says DNA pioneer.

There's no point in rehashing the rapid sequence of events in detail: several of Watson's sold-out speaking engagements were cancelled, many critical articles appeared in the British press, trailed by the American press a few days later, hundreds of blogs were fuming with negative commentary, including ones by the editors of Scientific American and Wired Magazine, a number of associations issued statements condemning his words, and soon he was suspended from his chancellorship at Cold Spring Harbor. Watson cancelled his already ruined book tour and flew home to tend to the destruction. It was too late; the eminent biologist retired in disgrace on Oct. 26th.

One thing, though, was conspicuously missing from this whole irritating denouement: any semblance of factual refutation. There is good reason for this: everything Watson got in trouble for saying was entirely correct!

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The "scientific community" is a broad and inappropriately encompassing term, but to the extent such a thing exists as a social or public entity (I'm not talking about the research literature), it is fair to say it has pronounced Watson's claims not only false, but also outside the bounds of "legitimate" scientific discourse. Since only a small fraction of scientific disciplines have any relevance to Watson's claims, it is clear almost all of these scientists are just evaluating the claims with the same ignorant, moralized mental framework people in the general public use to look at (and editorialize upon) scientific claims about evolution.

Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true? The Science Museum in London responded by canceling Watson's speaking engagement by deeming this claim, not only scientifically false, but outside the realm of "legitimate" scientific inquiry (Whatever that is!) altogether:

In a statement, [The Science Museum in London] said: "We know that eminent scientists can sometimes say things that cause controversy and the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics.

"However, the Science Museum feels that Nobel Prize winner James Watson's recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are as a result cancelling his talk at the museum."

Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true? Francis Collins, Watson's successor over the Human Genome Project, told the media this is not true:

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said that "I am deeply saddened by the events of the last week, and understand and agree with Dr. Watson's undoubtedly painful decision to retire in the aftermath of a racist statement he made that was both profoundly offensive and utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.

Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true? Rick Kittles told the media this is not true:

Rick Kittles, an associate professor of genetic medicine at the University of Chicago, said Watson's remarks aren't backed by science.

Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true? Robert Sternberg told the media that the 'scientific findings' show otherwise:

Robert Sternberg, a prominent researcher on race and IQ at Tufts University, called Watson's statement "racist and most regrettable."

"It is unfortunate that some people with great expertise in one area sometimes lose their sense of perspective and come to view themselves as expert in areas about which they know nothing," Sternberg said Thursday in an e-mail response to questions. "They then proceed to embarrass themselves as well as society in general with their comments that express their own ideology rather than scientific findings."

Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true? Steven Rose told the media that the scientific literature shows otherwise:

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said: "... If [Watson] knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."

Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true? The Federation of American Scientists issued a statement condemning Watson, claiming that there is no scientific literature showing this:

The Federation of American Scientists condemns the comments of Dr. James Watson that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine on October 14th... The scientific enterprise is based on the promotion and proof of new ideas through evidence, however controversial, but Dr. Watson chose to use his unique stature to promote personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science.

Unfortunately our esteemed band of sputtering media scientists forgot to provide, in all of these instances, any of their allegedly voluminous citations to the contrary. Allow me, then, to take a different position, with the added benefit of evidence:

James Watson is one of the most important living figures in American science. The claim in his new book Avoid Boring People, that basic evolutionary logic predicts we should expect intelligence differences between racial groups is, if anything, an uncomplicated truth. Watson's claim in his recent interview with Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe that intelligence testing shows lower scores in Africa than Europe is likewise, entirely supported by the scientific literature. As is Dr. Watson's statement that there are many talented people of African descent, which clarifies he is speaking of different average scores, not that said populations are homogenous.

Below I am adding 65 psychometric intelligence study citations for sub-Saharan Africa, collected in IQ & Global Inequality, Race Differences in Intelligence, and IQ & the Wealth of Nations. The citations cover 47% of SS African countries or 78% of the people by national population numbers. The studies vary in quality, sample size, and representativeness, but broadly agree in their findings. Representative studies of the school age population with large sample sizes do not exhibit higher scores, much less scores that approach anything like European norms.

Starting in the 1960s and picking up pace in the early 1990s various well-implemented student assessment tests have been conducted for the purposes of international educational comparisons, including the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the International Educational Achievement (IEA) measures, and the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The cross-cultural test construction, sampling techniques, and quality control for these tests are exemplary. These international tests have also included half a dozen sub-Saharan African countries, and the test construction and sampling techniques are likewise very good. For example Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa were included in TIMSS 2003. For each tested grade level, at least 5000 random students from 150 schools were tested in these countries.

Gene Expression bloggers recognized the strong correlation between these types of tests and IQ as far back as 2004, but recently this has reached the academic literature. Last year Richard Lynn and Jaan Mikk reported correlations of .92-1.00 between IQ and TIMSS 2003 for math and science.

In his paper, Heiner Rindermann takes this sort of analysis to the next level by collecting data from all 20 total international student assessment tests encompassing some 78 countries and comparing them with measured IQ data from 128 countries. Rindermann finds, first of all that the combined national student results correlate perfectly with the combined national IQ data (.98), demonstrating the assessment scores and the IQ scores are the same measured construct. With all these diverse kinds of tests for each nation, Rindermann examines the data together through factor analysis and finds that the g factor of intelligence explains some 95% of the variance in the test results: "Thus, cognitive ability differences across nations are by and large unidimensional". (p 681) The stable differences between nations in all cognitive type tests are explained by the g factor.

... I do not believe that the [sub-Saharan testing] scores at the general level are largely incorrect: The low values correspond to too many other variables and aspects standing for low cognitive abilities like results of student assessment and Piaget studies (e.g. Botswana in IEA-Reading 14 year-old pupils 1991 330, as IQ 75; South-Africa in TIMSS 8th graders 1999 259, as IQ 64; Ghana in TIMSS 8th graders 2003 266, as IQ 65; South-Africa in TIMSS 8th graders 2003 254, as IQ 63; plausibility considerations lead to lower results for the youth of Africa because of low school attendance rates and unrepresentative participation of countries), poor quality school systems, high skipping rates, low rates of high school degrees, low patent application rates, no famous universities, and many reports of everyday behaviour from officials, traders, journalists, ethnologists and other scientists in 19th century to this day... (p 770)

Thus typical African IQ scores of 70 and below can still be taken as a reliable finding. It is not simply the manufactured data of racialist researchers, or a byproduct of inadequate testing procedures. And, more importantly from the standpoint of the Watson controversy, certainly no reliable body of evidence has shown anything like parity with typical European scores.

I'd like to reiterate, then, that IQs below 70 do not by themselves signify mental retardation, as it is commonly understood as a pathological state.

There are two types of retardation: familial and organic. The former is caused by normal population variation in intelligence while the latter is caused by diverse individual problems such as genetic defects or head injuries. Related to this, the IQ scores of people with familial retardation correlate normally with their parent and sibling's IQ scores (.50), while the IQ scores of people with organic retardation are not much associated with the IQs in their family.

Retardation is measured by a combination of IQ and adaptive scales. Sometimes an IQ of 70 is used as the threshold of retardation. People with familial retardation and organic retardation of matched IQ perform the same in academic and training contexts, but organically retarded individuals do worse on the adaptive scales which measure things such as self-care, motor skills, and social functioning, signifying a broader range of mental dysfunction and some sort of developmental damage.

In the US, consistent with the normal bell curve, there are proportionately about five times as many blacks (16%) with an IQ of 70 or below than there are whites (3%). But basically the same proportional number of whites and blacks are organically retarded (whites 1.5%, blacks 2.0%). (The g Factor, p 369)

The African scores indicate that there are proportionately about seventeen times as many sub-Saharan Africans with IQs below 70 (50%) than American whites (3%), and possibly even more. While organic retardation is probably somewhat higher among Africans, due to overall more challenging health conditions, this should in no way be regarded as characteristic of their normal intelligence variation.

There is nothing particularly meaningful or necessary about an IQ of 70 as a threshold for 'retardation'. La Griffe Du Lion writes:

In 1959, [the American Association on Mental Deficiency] set the IQ threshold for mental retardation at 85. The civil rights movement of the next decade forced psychologists to rethink this boundary, because half the African American population fell below it. In 1973, responding to this concern, AAMD (by then AAMR) changed the threshold for retardation from IQ 85 to IQ 70. The boundary moved south by one standard deviation! The proportion of blacks below the threshold instantly dropped from about 50 percent to 12 percent.

In other words 50% of modern Africans are no more 'mentally retarded' than 50% of African-Americans were 'mentally retarded' in the 1960s. These are labels of convenience designed for normal within-population variation. But the real world academic and economic consequences of IQs of 70-85 and below are the same no matter what you label them.

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INTELLIGENCE DOES NOT EXIST

Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments ... proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate...)

Of course pointing to the testing data alone is hardly sufficient to quell these latter-day inquisitors. There is, sadly, an infinite regress of obscurantist objections designed to intellectually moot these issues entirely. These objections are not scientific, and are at odds with the data, logic, and, more often, both.

Systematic media misrepresentations of psychometric science have been occurring for going on 40 years.

In 1988 Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman published The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Along with data from their 1987 study of over 1000 scholars in fields familiar with IQ testing, such as psychology, sociology, and behavioral genetics, Rothman and Snyderman took a quantitative look at media coverage of IQ and demonstrated how this media coverage habitually diverged with mainstream scholarly opinion.

This is particularly egregious during times of IQ controversy.

Media reports and editorials were quick to attack Watson on the premise that any statement about intelligence measures is scientifically indefensible, because science cannot study something so immeasurable and indefinable as intelligence. Cornelia Dean reporting for the New York Times did just this:

[T]here is wide disagreement about what intelligence consists of and how - or even if - it can be measured in the abstract.

... science has no agreed-upon definition of "intelligence" either - let alone an agreed-upon method to test it. All kinds of cultural biases have been identified in IQ tests, for example. If there is something fundamental in our brains that regulates our capacity to learn, we have yet to separate its effects from the effects of everything that we experience after we're born.

Sternberg, a critic of traditional intelligence testing, believes intelligence can mean something different for different cultures. In parts of Africa, a good gauge of intelligence might be how well someone avoids infection with malaria -- a test of cleverness that most Americans likely would flunk.

In the same way, for many Africans who take Western IQ tests, "our problems aren't relevant to them," Sternberg said."

First of all, an intelligence test cannot and is not designed to tell you the reasons people score differently. So the fact that the test by itself has nothing to say about genetics is not a failure of the test. Second, the assertion of widespread chaos within science over intelligence is false. The statement that there are a number of theoretical differences about the concept of intelligence is only trivially true. In the practical context of research, provisional understanding, and 'normal science' this is rhetorically equivalent to underlining evolution as "only a theory" in media reports. Intelligence as a working scientific research concept and tool is both widespread (as a search for terms such as 'IQ', 'Intelligence' or 'cognitive ability' on PubMed, Google Scholar, or similar publication databases will show), and broadly consistent in approaches and shared theory, methods, premises, and data. The American Psychological Association's 11 member 'taskforce', assembled for a consensus statement on intelligence research, reported:

... [M]uch of our discussion is devoted to the dominant psychometric approach, which has not only inspired the most research and attracted the most attention (up to this time) but is by far the most widely used in practical settings.

Third, "All kinds of cultural biases" certainly have not been reported in IQ tests. The tests are not "biased" in the sense that psychometricians use this term. Again the APA taskforce showed consensus on this issue:

... the relevant question is whether the tests have a "predictive bias" against Blacks, Such a bias would exist if African-American performance on the criterion variables (school achievement, college GPA, etc.) were systematically higher than the same subjects' test scores would predict. This is not the case. The actual regression lines (which show the mean criterion performance for individuals who got various scores on the predictor) for Blacks do not lie above those for Whites; there is even a slight tendency in the other direction (Jensen, 1980; Reynolds &:Brown, 1984). Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans.

Similarly Robert Sternberg argues that the tests are biased because they allegedly don't measure the sorts of abilities that are necessary for Africans to succeed in their unique environmental niche. This statement is not only a patronizing and idyllic caricature of African needs, but is also empirically false. This idea was addressed by psychologist Earl Hunt in his peer commentary on Rindermann:

There are two reasons that national-level differences in intelligence have been disregarded. One is that it can be argued that intelligence, as evaluated by these tests, is a Western concept, and that the abilities evaluated by the tests may not be the ones valued by non-western societies. This is a spurious argument for two reasons. First, the economic indicators we are trying to relate to intelligence are also Western concepts. As the commentator Thomas Friedman has said, the world is flat. We are not asking whether or not various national populations have the ability to compete in their own societies, we are asking about their ability to compete in the Western-defined international marketplace. The tests are appropriately designed to address this question. (p 727)

In fact, economists Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann report that the association between economic outcomes and measured intelligence appear to be even higher within developing African countries than within Western countries. (pp 13-15) Similarly, at the national level, psychologists Earl Hunt and Werner Wittmann found that the relationship between GDP and national average IQ was stronger for the mostly African developing countries than it was among the developed industrial countries. (0.70 vs 0.58)

In their literature review, Kendall, Verster, and Von Mollendorf found that correlations between employee performance and educational outcomes and cognitive ability did not differ for blacks and whites in Southern Africa. In other words, at school or on the job, an African white with an IQ score of 70 will perform no different than an African black with the same score. Similarly an African black with an IQ of 115 performs the same as an African white with the same score.

So "our problems" certainly are relevant to Africans, and certainly are "their" problems. Unless issues such as child mortality, health, sanitation, rule of law, political stability, material comfort, global influence, and life expectancy are somehow not relevant to Africans.

Appearances to the contrary, the mendacious Robert Sternberg is, in fact, implicitly agreeing with Watson, while nevertheless shouting him down in the media. Sternberg does not deny that psychometric general intelligence is as low as reported in Africa, nor does he deny that this psychometric intelligence has the academic and economic consequences that the "racist... know-nothing" Watson implied it did. In fact, Sternberg himself has conducted intelligence studies in East Africa, and found the same characteristically 70ish IQ scores, as well as correlations between IQ and academic achievement in this region similar to the correlations reported in developed countries. Thus Sternberg's reply to Watson in The New Scientist:

The tests as they stand show some differences between various groups of children. The size of the differences and what groups do best in the tests depend on what is tested. For example, with various collaborators I have found that analytical tests of the kind traditionally used to measure so-called general abilities tend to favour Americans of European and Asian origin, while tests of creative and practical thinking show quite different patterns. On a test of oral storytelling, for example, Native Americans outperform other groups.

Ok, so Sternberg agrees that people of European and Asian descent do better on the analytical and general ability tests that reflect the skills vital for functioning in a first-world globalized economy, and therefore must be claiming that Watson is a racist ignoramus only for privileging these general abstract reasoning abilities with the designation of 'intelligence' over the 'oral storytelling intelligence' of Native-Americans, or the 'mosquito dodging intelligence' of sub-Saharan Africans! But if oral storytelling or mosquito dodging are not useful "intelligences" for lifting an individual or a nation out of 1 dollar a day poverty, then Watson can hardly be faulted for expressing concern about the kinds of intelligence not abundant in Africa.

Sternberg is perhaps the most blameworthy scientist to publicly condemn Watson, because he is familiar enough with the data to know Watson is right. His condescending statement that dodging mosquitoes is what characterizes the extent of African needs, is itself seemingly more "racist" than, if not completely identical in substance to, what Watson said. At least Watson appeared to show some sort of concern for what Africans countries require to industrialize, while Sternberg appears to be relativistically dismissing there are problems at all: "Africans are perfectly intelligent... for living like Africans!"

Actually, I believe Sternberg is taking the stage to condemn the factually correct Watson for his own petty academic reasons: Sternberg believes his own unpopular 'practical intelligence' (PDF) model could become more popular if the dominant psychometric model becomes increasingly professionally and personally dangerous to touch. Like Howard Gardner's empirically unimpressive 'Multiple Intelligences', there is an intellectual market for politically correct ideas like Sternberg's model, and fanning the flames of controversy around psychometrics is one way these ideas can cheat to become more popular.

Media red herrings about the supposed ineffability of intelligence or lies about the scientific worthlessness of intelligence testing are designed to moot honesty and openness on this issue, and simply side step the uncomfortable facts. But avoiding facts does not change reality or help shape it to our liking. Intelligence measures predict the kind of social and personal outcomes that people the world over agree are important and desirable. For this reason we need to start engaging this data instead of shooting the messengers. Especially when the messengers we are so casually discarding are important figures like James Watson.

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RACE DOES NOT EXIST

Population genetics now provides a set of reasonably powerful statistical tools that allow us to determine whether... genes that play a role in the brain evolve much faster in certain human races than in others... The answers to such questions could clearly be awkward, if not incendiary... [O]ne of the most obvious questions about population genetic studies of human beings, especially human races [is s]hould they be performed?... The interesting point - and it's not widely appreciated - is that this question is rapidly becoming moot. Vast quantities of information about the human genome now pour into publicly available databases on a daily basis. These data are collected with the noblest of intentions (often medical) and are also made public for perfectly good reasons: citizens should have ready access to the fruits of publicly funded science. Indeed it's almost impossible to imagine how one could stop the sorts of studies I described above. In previous times, granting agencies, such as the NIH or NSF, could block funding for undesirable experiments or scientific journals could refuse to publish them. But with genomic data, minimal money is required (an Internet connection is enough) and any bright graduate student working in his parents' garage could ask and answer any awkward question he likes. And the Internet thoroughly dashes any chance of preventing the publication of unpleasant results.

... [T]here is no scientific basis for [Watson's comments] ... For one thing, science has no agreed-upon definition of "race": however you slice up the population, the categories look pretty arbitrary.

Second, the idea that there is a genetically meaningful African 'race' is nonsense. There is wide cultural and genetic diversity amongst African populations from south to north, from Ethiopians to Nigerians. There are, for example probably genetic as well as environmental reasons why Ethiopians make good marathon runners whereas Nigerians on the whole do not.

To group the entire diverse populations of Africa together is a characteristically racist trick.

Other scientists point out that our species is so young - Homo sapiens emerged from its African homeland only 100,000 years ago - that it simply has not had time to evolve any significant differences in intellectual capacity as its various groups of people have spread round the globe and settled in different regions. Only the most superficial differences - notably skin colour - separate the world's different population groupings. Underneath that skin, people are remarkably alike.

Damaging statements such as Watson's -- and the potential for misuse of research on race -- has led many scientists to avoid the topic altogether. In a 1998 "Statement on 'Race,'" the American Anthropological Association concluded that ordinary notions of race have little value for biological research in part because of the relatively minor genetic differences among racial groups.

As Craig Venter, who pioneered much of America's work in decoding the human genome, put it: 'There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human gene code for the notion that skin colour will be predictive of intelligence.'

... [T]here is nothing special about skin colour that serves as a basis for differentiating humans into so-called races... Curiously, we do not apply the concept of "race" to colours of dogs or cats... [These] problems with our understanding of ... race show that the criticism being levelled at Watson is based on science rather than political correctness... race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one.

Well, it's good to see that Venter and Sternberg are basing their criticisms on SCIENCE instead of political correctness! Of course the purposefully obscurantist conflation between 'skin color' and ancestry is something I've dealt with before.

These individuals would not be classified by geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, physical anthropologists, or any sort of scientist as members of the European race. They would not self-identify as white Americans, nor would they be considered as such. They would be eligible for affirmative action.

Human races, like dog 'breeds', are defined in the biological context by shared ancestry, not by single appearance traits. With ancestry you can predict many genes and many traits, but with single genes or single traits, you can not predict many other genes or traits. Which is why you can still easily identify the ancestry of the depigmented individuals in the above picture. Population ancestry predicts the sum patterns of one's genotype and phenotypical traits (e.g. general racial appearance) while any single variable - in this case, skin color - does not.

Denial of this fact was dubbed Lewontin's Fallacy (PDF) by British geneticist A.W.F. Edwards. 'Skin color' is a false and intentionally misleading straw-definition of race, that dishonorable public scientists such as Sternberg and Venter use to manufacture consent for their ideological viewpoints about human equality.

Steven Rose argues that the racial grouping 'sub-Saharan Africans' racistly lumps "diverse populations", but in the next breath uses such equally problematic and diversity encompassing racial categories as 'Nigerians' and 'Ethiopians'. And that is the problem with 'race' criticism, any population concept is diverse and fuzzy - German, Northwest European, New Yorker, Ashkenazi Jew, Asian - and yet the population concept is an essential cog in evolutionary science. The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis that grounded evolutionary theory in genetics, was the vital fusion of Darwin and population genetics. A population is a race is a population. To deny the population is literally a denial of evolution.

Race critics don't and could never explain satisfactorily why groupings like 'sub-Saharan Africans', 'Mediterranean', or 'Dutch' have no place in science, and more importantly the way scientists do use such groupings in practice belies the alleged uselessness (that is, like intelligence, the population concept clearly allows them to perform 'normal science'). And, yes, Dr. Rose, 'African' is a genetically meaningful entity:

In one of the most extensive of these studies to date, considering 1,056 individuals from 52 human populations, with each individual genotyped for 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, we found that individuals could be partitioned into six main genetic clusters, five of which corresponded to Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas

You'll note, also, that this coauthor of the extreme anti-hereditarian tract Not In Our Genes also suggests marathon running ability in Ethiopia has a genetic component. This belief has become socially acceptable, but the evidence for genetic differences in population intelligence is hardly less spectacular than the evidence for this difference. I don't recall the large transracial adoption study that tested for marathon running. Each of these inferences can be based on the cross-cultural consistency and physiological correlates (PDF) of performance. It is ideology, not data, which keeps Rose from drawing the same inferences about the intelligence difference. It is also ideology that allows Rose to keep his job for this comment, while Watson lost his job for his substantively identical, yet socially taboo comment.

The claim that there has not been enough time for evolution to act on non-superficial traits is not scientific. First because nonsuperficial traits take no more time to evolve than superficial traits. More importantly, reasonable selection parameters allow for significant differences to arise between populations in 100 years, much less 100,000. Richard Lynn argues that genetics account for 1.3 SD in intelligence between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. Genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending illustrates how a 1 SD difference in a hypothetical trait, with a lower additive heritability than intelligence, could evolve in 500 years:

... [A]ssume time preference has an additive heritability of 25%. Assume that everyone with time preference more than 1 sd above the mean of the distribution has double the fitness of everyone else. About 16% of the population then has twice the number of offspring as everyone else on average.

After a generation of reproduction the new mean time preference will be increased by (0.2 * .25) or 5% of a standard deviation. In 20 generations, 500 years, time preference should go up by a full standard deviation.

This is similar to Cochran and Harpending's model (PDF) for the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence. Also allowing for .5-1 SD higher intelligence in mere centuries.

... the argument that the 100,000 years or so since the dispersal out of Africa were insufficient for the evolution of genetic differences is invalid. To create an IQ difference of, say, 15 points between two populations in 100,000 years, natural selection would have to drive their IQs apart by only 0.004 points every generation - about 1% of the selective pressure in late 20th-century America

Furthermore, is it true that races only differ in a few appearance related genes? Nope. We already have this data and it's not true by a long shot. Nick Wade reported early last year in the New York Times:

In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago.

Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion, suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods.

Some of the genes are active in the brain and, although their role is not known, may have affected behavior. So perhaps the brain gene changes seen by Dr. Pritchard in East Asians have some connection with the psychological traits described by Dr. Nisbett.

In fact, far from being identical, virtually all genes that are related to individual differences in human health and behavior differ to some degree in their frequency between racial populations. This is something you can and should test for yourself.

Gene Expression blogger p-ter recently wrote a very nice post titled So You Want to be a Population Geneticist. This is a How-2 for several genetic databases that can be used by anyone with an Internet connection to search for allele frequencies or signatures of selection. You can use these to look at the gene frequencies of the four population groups from the International HapMap Project: Utah whites, Nigerian Yoruba, Han Chinese, and Tokyo Japanese.

You'll note then that the International HapMap Project is designed to illuminate the genetic differences between these four "sliced-up", "arbitrary", "diverse", "genetically meaningless" racial populations, that are "defined by skin color". Didn't the HapMap people get the memo from SCIENCE that these categories are a racist biological fiction???

Go into Google News, and look under search terms like 'gene' and 'genes', and pick any random recent news items reporting an association between some gene/s and some sort of individual differences. This would not include studies that e.g. talk about genes that differentiate humans or chimpanzees, or that claim no individual differences.

Take the genes you find in the news and plug them into the HapMap Genome Browser , using p-ter's tips, and look how the frequencies differ. We even have an open thread for you to test your own hypotheses and report your findings from these databases. Unlike Watson's righteous regulators, we don't believe your hypotheses are immoral or "beyond the point of acceptable debate".

Posters on the Half Sigma blog recently used p-ter's post to see how CHRM2, a gene described as the first "yielding consistent evidence of association with IQ across multiple studies conducted by independent research groups", was distributed across the HapMap populations:

T is *way* more present than A in rs324650 among East Asians (91%) relative to Europeans (47%) and blacks (27%). Since T is associated with an increase in 4-5 points of performance IQ (what is that, anyway? Is that different from G?) that is significant.

The poster 'Marc' continued by examining how alleles differed for DTNBP1:

Let's look at rs:760761, rs:2619522 and rs:2619538, all of which are associated with increased or decreased intelligence in DTNBP1.

Regarding rs:760761, 18% of Europeans carry the T allele, which knocks about 8 points off the ol' IQ, compared to around 7% of East Asians and 37% of blacks.

Regarding rs:2619522, the numbers are similar. 18% of whites carry the G allele, which knocks about 7 points off the ol' IQ, versus around 8% of Asians and 35-36% of blacks...

Regarding rs:2619538, 61% of whites carry the T allele, which adds about 6.5 points to one's IQ, versus about 1% of Asians and 67% of blacks...

If 6% more blacks carry the T allele than whites (67% vs. 61%) on rs:2619538, and the T allele codes for 6.5 FSIQ (full scale IQ) points, then this gives blacks an advantage of .4 IQ points over whites from this SNP.

Also, if 60% more whites carry the T allele than Asians, and the T allele codes for 6.5 FSIQ points, than this gives whites an advantage of 3.9 IQ points over Asians from this SNP.

So the cumulative effect thus far would be:minus 3.6 points for blacks relative to whites;and minus 0.2 points for East Asians relative to whites.

A difference in one or two "intelligence genes" does not by itself suggest that one population is smarter than another, because evolutionary environments select for phenotypes not genotypes. So when populations have many genetic differences, the genes may interact in different ways, and some of the genes that make individuals more intelligent in one population may not have the same effect in another. (In other words if we'd prefer to not take the above results at face value, we have to accept that races are even more genetically different, not less)

However, several pieces of evidence make it doubtful that most intelligence genes are like this. For one, mixed race people generally have IQ scores about midway between their parent populations. (save one study of Eurasian mixes) So I would say the gradual accumulation of similar results for other "intelligence genes" would certainly serve as evidence for the genetic viewpoint.

These differences do illustrate, in yet another way, the falseness of popular arguments that races are genetically identical, or that genetic differences can somehow only exist for "appearance genes". But virtually any gene showing individual differences that you plug in those databases will also be distributed differently among racial groups and demonstrate the same points.

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THE MIND IS A BLANK SLATE

James Watson implied a belief that the uniquely low intelligence of both continental Africans and African-Americans are probably related to familiar genetic causes. This belief is deemed unacceptable to express in public, even in most academic contexts, or hold in private. This is despite the fact that the research evidence in support of this position is stronger than the research evidence that contradicts it. Thus even top scientists like Watson are punished for holding beliefs that are more scientific and logical, while scientists that hold to less scientific beliefs and illogical arguments are rewarded. This is a rot on the soul of science.

Many statements in the press asserted or implied that various environmental theories account for intelligence differences between ethnic groups. These statements do not, in fact, agree with the evidence.

The study of racial differences in IQ is among the most deeply contentious fields in all of science. Most researchers agree that tests have revealed some differences among racial groups -- but even larger differences between people of different income levels.

Even where there are such average differences in IQ score, as for instance between Black and White populations in the US, there are no scientifically valid methods to enable one to untangle the many interacting factors of the validity of IQ tests themselves, as measures of anything other than school performance, educational and social deprivation, the history of slave-owners versus slaves and continuing racism, which may account for them.

Jan Schnupp, a lecturer in neurophysiology at Oxford University, said Watson's remarks "make it very clear that he is an expert on genetics, not on intelligence."

Schnupp said undernourished and undereducated people often perform worse on intelligence tests than the well off.

"Race has nothing to do with it, and there is no fundamental obstacle to black people becoming exceptionally bright," Schnupp said."

Contrary to the above claims, differences in intelligence between income groups are not larger than intelligence differences between racial groups in the US, nor do differences in income or wealth account for the racial differences. Whites from households in the lowest income bracket have higher IQ scores than blacks from households in the highest income bracket:

One of the most disturbing, I think perhaps the most disturbing fact in our whole book is that black students coming from families earning over 70,000 are doing worse on their SATS, on average--it's always on average--than white students from families in the lowest income group. You want to cry hearing that figure. I mean, it's so terrible.

One of the largest modern sociology studies of American students found that ethnicity was the single most important predictor of academic achievement:

Chin quotes with approval a book, "Beyond the Classroom," by Laurence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown and Sanford M. Dornbusch, which says "of all the demographic factors we studied in relation to school performance, ethnicity was the most important. . . . In terms of school achievement, it is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents, or to have a mother who is able to stay at home full time."

Contra Rose, a number of experiments are able to test all of these environmental theories. For one transracial adoptionexperiments control for all the shared aspects of the environment that differ between whites and blacks (parenting, income, nutrition, neighborhood), while structural equation models test for possible uncommon factors between whites and blacks that could be acting on IQ (which would include things like racism). These experiments do not lend support to any existing or plausible environmental theories for the remaining lower intelligence scores of people of African descent in Western societies. The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study found that, by adulthood, the difference in IQ scores between adopted black and adopted white children raised side by side in the same high income households in mostly homogeneous Northern US upper class neighborhoods was 18 IQ points (p 185):

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study

IQ at Age 7IQ at Age 17

W-W 111.5 W-W 101.5W-B 105.4 W-B 93.2B-B 91.4 B-B 83.7

W-W = Adopted children with two white biological parents. W-B = Adopted children with one black and one white biological parent. B-B = Adopted children with two black biological parents.

The W-W/W-B difference is 8.3 IQ points. The B-W/B-B difference is 9.5 IQ points. And the W-W/B-B difference is 17.8 IQ points.

The difference in IQ scores between 2 black biological parent adoptees and 1 black biological parent adoptees is nearly 10 IQ points despite the fact that both share the exact same social identity.

Similarly a dozen mixed race children that were raised under some mistaken information that they had two black biological parents nevertheless developed IQ scores like the other mixed race children.

There are no simple or plausible environmental theories to explain these kinds of findings.

An additional popular argument is that the Flynn Effect, the observed rise in IQ scores over time, is evidence that African-Americans or African countries will eventually reach parity with white norms. This typically includes the premise that white intelligence in the recent past was even lower than modern black intelligence. A typical example:

US Blacks, with an average IQ today of 85, have the same IQ as US Whites with an IQ of 100 in 1957. If 1957 US Whites were not stupid, then neither are US Blacks today. It's time to shut up about the "low Black IQ", since by any reasonable standard, it is not really low at all.

These arguments are wrong for the simple fact that the Flynn Effect is not a gain in real g factor intelligence, while the differences between nations and ethnic groups are differences in g factor intelligence. These findings led a 2004 team to state:

It appears therefore that the nature of the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from the nature of B-W [Black-White] differences in the United States... [so] implications of the Flynn effect for B-W differences appear small...

James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, reiterates (DOC) these points:

Factor analysis is a way of measuring this tendency of some people to do better or worse than average across the board; and it yields something called g (a sort of super-correlation coefficient), which psychologists call the general intelligence factor...

When you analyze IQ gains over time, you often find that they do not constitute enhancement of these latent traits -- they do not seem to be general intelligence gains, or quantitative factor gains, or verbal factor gains (Wicherts et al, in press). In the language of factor analysis, this means that IQ gains over time tend to display 'measurement artifacts or cultural bias'. For a second time, we are driven to the conclusion that massive IQ gains are not intelligence gains or, indeed, any kind of significant cognitive gains. (pp 27-28)

Flynn believes the secular increase represents important changes in specific narrow aspects of developed cognitive style, but not a rise in g intelligence.

It is therefore incorrect that 1945 US whites were less intelligent than 2007 US blacks. The Flynn Effect has little apparent bearing on racial intelligence gaps.

This also applies to developing countries. The Flynn Effect reveals that IQ scores in the developed world were some 1.5-2 standard deviations lower in the beginning of the 20th century. (See this GNXP post for the data) These scores are similar to ones in modern African. Some studies also reveal even faster Flynn gains in developing countries than what we observe in developed countries, and it is argued these countries are simply experiencing, in slight delay, what happened in developed countries during the 20th century. But this interpretation is not tenable if there were no actual rises in g factor intelligence in developed countries. It is incorrect that developed countries had lower g intelligence in the first half of the 20th century corresponding to IQs of 70. Meanwhile, as the Rindermann paper reveals, the scores across modern nations do correspond to real intelligence differences. Likewise, extremely low IQ scores in modern Africa, unlike scores in developed countries prior to the mid-20th century, correspond to genuine deficits in g intelligence.

With improvements in nutrition it is likely that scores in Africa will rise over time. But these increases will probably be genuine and of a different nature than what we observed in developed countries. It is unlikely that scores in Africa will meet or rise above those of African-Americans in the next century.

All of this underlines the fact that IQ can't always be taken at face value. Gains or differences in IQ exceeding 1 SD can sometimes be 'hollow', or unreflective of real general intelligence, being manifested only at the lower order strata of intelligence. (See this paper examining how these false gains can arise through practice effects) Fortunately we have good methods for evaluating the construct validity of the tests and the integrity of the IQ scores.

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WATSON RECANTS?

Many intellectuals refuse to interpret psychometric claims or ideas about human diversity rationally. Despite 100 years of data showing that ethnic groups differ in their general intelligence, these claims are still rejected on moral grounds. Many of those who deny these claims either implicitly believe that 'intelligence' is a reflection of human worth, or believe any claim of such a difference must be a cryptic assertion of racial worth. Either way it prevents the claims from being interpreted fairly, in the factual, rather than normative, manner intended by the people who attempt to discuss this science in an open forum.

Watson's original statements about the lower general intelligence of Africans were interpreted as statements about the lower human worth of Africans. When Watson then publicly apologized that his words were being misinterpreted in this way and clarified that claims about racial intelligence differences are not claims about human worth, the confused media reported that Watson had recanted his claims about intelligence differences!!

Watson said in a statement he issued at the Royal Society Thursday. "That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

And on that much at least, he's right. For one thing, science has no agreed-upon definition of "race": however you slice up the population, the categories look pretty arbitrary. For another, science has no agreed-upon definition of "intelligence" either

And Cornelia Dean at the New York Times asserted, not once, but in two separate reports that Watson retracted his intelligence claims. Even doctoring Watson's apology by cut-and-pasting together two entirely separate Watson quotes:

In an interview published Sunday in The Times of London, Dr. Watson is quoted as saying that while "there are many people of color who are very talented," he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa."

"All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Dr. Watson said in a statement given to The Associated Press. "There is no scientific basis for such a belief."

Dr. Watson... was quoted in The Times of London last week as suggesting that, overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent. In the ensuing uproar, he issued a statement apologizing "unreservedly" for the comments, adding "there is no scientific basis for such a belief".

To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief...

The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity....

To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers.

Watson would only be retracting his intelligence claims if he considered those claims tantamount to claims of 'superiority' or 'inferiority', which he clearly emphasizes he doesn't. Watson is saying that questioning that all races are equal in intelligence is not racism, it is trying to figure out why the world looks the way it does, with the greatest engineers and the greatest musicians disproportionately coming, in a systematic way, from different racial backgrounds. In other words culturally separated people of African descent have been musical innovators across a diverse range of cultures (in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean), while culturally separated people of East Asian descent have excelled at math and science across a diverse range of cultures (in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean).

This is not a claim of racial 'superiority' or 'inferiority', either in terms of legal worth or even in terms of overall talent - since groups all have different strengths and weaknesses. It is simply the recognition that people of different genetic heritage, on average, reveal different talents wherever they are found in the world, and there is one explanation that best accounts for these observations: evolution.

In other words, Watson was thinking like a scientist. Which is exactly why he was punished.

The moral laws of our society dictate that we are not allowed to think scientifically about some issues. Especially not in public.

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IN CLOSING: WHO DAMAGED SCIENCE?

According to the media and members of the scientific community, James Watson hurt science itself.

"The damage to Watson's legacy from his statements may be difficult to mend," said Jerry Coyne, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Chicago.

"He's done tremendous damage to science, to himself and to social equality," Coyne said. "It makes us all look bad."

Along with E.O. Wilson, James Watson is perhaps the most distinguished living figure in American biology, and yet even he was not immune to immediate expulsion from the very lab he created and built up over 40 years of his life, and excommunication from the scientific establishment that celebrated him. All this for one crime: voicing scientific facts and hypotheses that made this community uncomfortable. The same personal and professional fate befell former Harvard president Larry Summers in 2005 for a purely academic discussion of females in science during an economics conference intended for discussing this very subject!

What effect will this continuing intellectual mob violence have on future and current scientists and researchers who want to freely study human genetics, cross-cultural psychology, sociology, or any discipline that may reveal similar facts that have the potential to cause their professional or personal destruction by an intellectual community that resembles the medieval church?

Those who punish, those who lie, those who silence, those who condemn, those who intimidate... they have corrupted science.

They have injured the intellectual openness, freedom, and fairness of our society and our institutions, with untold costs to our collective human well-being.